The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  “I feel like a carton of milk on its expiration date,” said Gray. “Sour. Everything has the strange quality of being abruptly over.”

  “I thought you were going to live to a hundred.”

  “Frankly, I can’t imagine as far as tomorrow morning.”

  Errol couldn’t imagine her tomorrow, either. Gray turned to him with a look of quizzical interest when he declined to say something boisterous. Errol could only smile weakly and shrug his shoulders. “You’ll manage somehow.” Errol wandered into the den. He needed to sit down.

  Unsettlingly, Nora’s portrait of Vincent Sarasola had been hung next to the leopards on the wall during the day. Errol tried to avoid looking over in that corner once he noticed it, but whenever his discipline waned, he’d find his eyes fixed on the portrait. Determinedly, he’d look away again.

  There was so much for them to talk about, but they couldn’t talk about these things, so that Errol felt, for the first time in years, awkward here, needing to make conversation. Gray sat down in her leather chair next to Errol on the couch, with the clear understanding that they were to talk now; their silence quickly became odd.

  “It’s supposed to snow more tonight,” said Errol feebly.

  Gray turned to Errol with incredulity. “You want to talk about the weather?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then why are you?”

  “To spare you.”—No, he didn’t say that. He spared her even that. “It’s your birthday,” he said instead. “We can talk about whatever you like.”

  “We could talk about,” she said, looking dully over at the desk, “how when you’re sixty the phone rarely disturbs your peaceful old age.”

  “You should know that there was a lot of talk about getting together a big wingding for you today—Tom was going to do it, those guys down at the museum. I stopped it all. You told me to. I told people to leave you alone today. No doubt you’ll get a lot of calls tomorrow.”

  “So you told everyone to leave me alone today, did you?”

  “No,” said Errol, shooting another glance at Vincent, “not everyone.” Errol kept wondering if there was some way of making this easier or better. He experimented. “Listen. Really…” This wasn’t going very well. “Why did you expect him to call today?”

  “You’re right, I shouldn’t. He’s probably too busy packing.”

  “Why packing?”

  “You know. Packing. Swimming trunks. Tennis racket. Deck chairs. And little bamboo umbrellas to stick in tall gin-and-tonics with a twist of lime.”

  Errol sat and stared. “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  Errol leaned back into the couch and tried to work this piece of the puzzle into the larger picture, but it didn’t fit anywhere. “Whatever happened to justice and power? I thought they were so practical.”

  “They are.” Gray couldn’t look him in the eye. “But other things are practical, too. Love is practical.”

  “Would he have known by today?”

  Gray nodded.

  “How did you expect him to react?”

  “You mean, did I think he’d come back? I spent hours upstairs deciding, Errol. I promised myself right off that if all I was doing was enticing him to return here I wouldn’t do it. No, I just gave him what he wanted. That was in my power, so I did that.”

  “If you didn’t expect anything back, why did you think he’d contact you today?”

  “Because I’m not perfect. I thought he might at least call. To thank me.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’d say, ‘You’re welcome.’”

  “Pretty marginal expectations.”

  “They were all I could afford.” She glanced at the phone. “Of course, it is early yet—”

  “Gray.” There was a stone in Errol’s stomach. “He’s not going to call.”

  Gray recoiled into her armchair and traced the veins on her hand. She took this as a reprimand. It was not. It was the truth. It was information.

  Errol rose from the couch and ambled around the den, treasuring the few moments now before he’d have to tell her. It was her birthday; they were together; he’d spare her a minute or two more, as a favor. He turned back to Gray and caught an image of her: tall and angular and almost cocky, her chin in her palm; thinking, he wondered what. It was incredible she was sixty years old.

  “You’re a real character, you know that?” said Errol softly. “I forget sometimes. I take you for granted. But we’ve traveled a lot, and I swear I’ve still never met anyone like you in the entire world.”

  That was when she’d said, “Errol, I’m tired of being a character,” and leaned back in her chair. They’d talked about age and tiredness. They’d remembered their first meeting twenty-five years before. And Errol had studied the obscure object of this last year.

  He’d been about to ask Gray to explain it to him, when suddenly the story seemed simple, after all. She was sixty. She’d fallen in love for the first time in her life, and not with Errol. It hadn’t “worked out.” That was the story. Errol had only to add the last few lines and it was done.

  “I’ve wondered,” said Gray, just as Errol was opening his mouth, “whether he’ll come back to visit. I don’t mean now, but in ten years, even twenty. I’m not sure I want him to see me at eighty, but I’d love to know what happens to him. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I know already.”

  “So do you think he’ll get by living off older women, or will he be something?”

  “That depends on your point of view. Maybe snagging a woman like you he did get to be something. He got you to lose a game, pay a check, even cry. Maybe that’s enough of an accomplishment for anyone’s lifetime. I couldn’t say.”

  There must have been a tenor to Errol’s voice that made Gray look up at him in that fantastically focused way she had sometimes; Errol averted his eyes and took a restless step or two from her chair. “I told you he wouldn’t call tonight—”

  “And clearly you were right.”

  “But not because I’m a good guesser. In the same way I know he won’t grow up to be anything he wasn’t already when he last walked out of this house.” Errol looked her in the eye, and she looked away, over toward the wildebeest. He wouldn’t proceed until she looked back at him, and even then it was a struggle, getting her to keep seeing what he was telling her, watch his mouth form certain words. Finally her pupils stopped darting around the room, and he held her gaze steadily, wrapping his eyes around her like arms in an embrace.

  They were little words. Now they were over.

  Errol kept looking at his mentor and best friend. Absolutely nothing in her face changed. She stared back at him. She said nothing. Maybe the little words hadn’t worked. All that had happened since Errol had said them was that the hairs on his arms had risen and a funny cold feeling had crawled up the back of his neck. His heart beat in his teeth. But Gray sat stonily in her chair; not a muscle moved; time passed. She seemed to be waiting for something—waiting for him to take it back.

  Gray looked down at her lap and picked a pill off her wool skirt. “But Raphael,” she said slowly, “is a very good driver.”

  “Was.”

  “What?”

  “Was a good driver.” He would start with verbs. Assembling reality was sometimes a difficult project. You turned your back on it for a moment and it slipped, pieces fell away; it was a mess a minute later. Doggedly you had to keep stacking it back up, like a tower of blocks before a defiant child.

  Gray’s forehead creased. “Of course. Was.”

  “It was probably icy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Icy.” At last she looked up. “Are you sure of this?”

  Errol looked back at her, almost smiling because she actually needed him to repeat it. Yet he tried to keep any tenderness out of his expression, tried to keep it hard and clear and relentless. All he wanted in his eyes was a car accident.

  Gray leaned her head back, her eyes at sea, watery and pale. You rem
ember how Ida made him repeat things? Three times.

  I remember.

  That was some story, wasn’t it?

  Yes, Gray. That was some story.

  Gray closed her eyes. “Where did this happen?”

  Errol named a road a couple of miles away.

  Does this make you happy?

  Come on.

  I know you didn’t like him. But you did like him as a boy, didn’t you? At least?

  Yes, Gray. He was a fine boy. And how I felt about him later? Well, that’s my secret.

  You never understood, you see. It was as if he had a disease, like hardening of the arteries. Hardening of something, anyway. He contracted it young; it was terminal. He was calcifying at a tremendous rate. Could you blame him?

  Sure I could. I did.

  “Errol. Which direction was he driving?”

  Errol pretended not to understand. “What difference does that make?”

  “Do you know?”

  Errol thought about lying, and about telling the truth. And then he realized that she was right: Raphael was a very good driver. All Errol’s concern in the Porsche that morning on the way to New York had been his own histrionics, nothing more. So that it really didn’t matter what he answered, after all.

  “He was driving toward here,” said Errol kindly.

  Yet when she heard, Gray, too, understood how little that mattered. Had he been in flight, he had not allowed himself to leave; had he been driving here, he had not allowed himself to arrive. Either way, there was a gesture and a cancellation paired. Together they made nothing. He wanted her; he did not. He loved her; he did not. He was, as Ida had said, a baby; he was a grown man, older, as he’d said himself, than Gray. He would come for her birthday; he would not. In the end they made nothing. In which direction was he driving? Whichever way he’d headed, he’d also stopped, abruptly, around a telephone pole. In the room that night were Errol and Gray. That was all.

  “Gray,” said Errol, groping at something that had troubled him for weeks now, “it didn’t have to be this way, did it? Sometimes it does work out, doesn’t it? Sometimes you fall for someone and they fall for you and you live in the same house and spend a lot of time together. Tell me that sometimes happens.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Gray,” Errol went on, “why did you choose someone who couldn’t do it?”

  She took a deep breath. “Choose? Do you choose? But that is a very good question.” She rubbed the arm of the chair. “Maybe I was still afraid, like those Masai, that a man would take my soul away. Maybe I was stupid, or misjudged him. Maybe I hate myself and love pain. Who’s to say?”

  But, Errol, why did you choose someone who couldn’t do it? That, too, was a very good question.

  “Maybe I’m being punished,” Gray added, “for admiring the wrong things.”

  “What things?”

  “All my life I’ve admired people who didn’t need anybody—Charles, Raphael, myself. So there’s a funny sort of justice in this, don’t you think? If you admire people who don’t need anybody, then they’re not going to need you, are they?”

  Her question hung in the air for a long time.

  “There’s one more thing,” Errol made himself say at last.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been asked to head that documentary project in New Guinea. I have to tell them yes or no this week.”

  “Oh?” said Gray in a small, tight voice.

  “Yes.” Errol spoke rapidly. “The money’s good, and it’s a great opportunity. Lots of leeway. And I’d be near Kyle. It’s probably a year’s worth of work, and if it went well I could pick up more NET grants. You know I like film…”

  “Yes, you certainly do.” Her throat seemed clogged; she cleared it. “When would this start?”

  “The project’s already behind schedule. As soon as I could wrap up my—other affairs.”

  “So you wouldn’t be going to Ghana.”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know. Especially if you didn’t go, I might not. According to a wire today, the women have started a hunger strike. The whole business is so depressing…Maybe I’d only follow through with the project to be with you. To do one more trip together.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Of course I do. When have you known me to be politely warm?”

  “When have I known you to be warm?”

  She looked down. “Not often enough.”

  “What do you think I should do?” asked Errol softly. “Should I take the job or not?”

  Errol looked at her imploringly. It would take nothing. She had almost said enough already. About wanting to travel with him. Gray, go ahead. Tell me that you need help; that the Porsche coiled around a telephone pole may be conversation now, unbelievable, but that later you’ll climb into your gray coupe, tomorrow morning or even tonight, and find the car down the road before they tow it away and drape yourself over the crinkled windshield of that car—tell me that you’ll need someone to lift you up and carry you away, someone to pick the bits of glass out of your hair and wipe away the smears of brown that would have dried onto your cheek and remove from your possession all the stray bits of shrapnel and that dented can of ravioli you’d collected from the wreckage as morbid souvenirs. Tell me, Gray, that you won’t eat without me, and I’ll stay. Tell me you won’t sleep well. Just say, Errol, I’d miss you horribly, please don’t go.

  In fact, Errol realized, she needn’t say any of these things at all. She need only say, Stay. She need only say, Errol, I don’t think you should take that job, and he would walk upstairs and write out his regrets this very evening, and then he would never leave, he knew that. He’d always have his office here, and he’d watch Gray finally give in year by year to being an old woman; Errol himself would gray and slow; until she didn’t publish as much and was mostly a figurehead, invited to many functions, given lots of awards and honorary degrees, but perhaps invited to speak less, and asked her opinion more out of deference than out of real concern over what she thought. This was all much, much later, when she was ninety, say, which she would be—Errol had little doubt she’d live to a hundred, after all. That would make Errol eighty-eight, and he’d wear a hat more and use a cane, and they would finally get a maid for this place, still over Gray’s protest, because she didn’t like them, where they came from. The maid would have to be white. They might, too, move the bedrooms downstairs to save climbing all those stairs day after day. The bedrooms, there would be two of them, as always, though in his old age Errol would finally forget why that ever mattered in the first place. When she died, at a hundred and two or three, he’d spend the final years of his own life working out his grief by writing her biography, and he’d be sure to live through to its publication, though after that he wouldn’t much care. She’d have left the house to him, and he’d totter in here evenings to light the crimson lamps, eye the dry bones of the wildebeest skeleton, and say hello to Ralph’s father. In his dotage, he’d talk to her sometimes as if she were still alive, forgetting in moments of senility that she was no longer perched in that leather chair, where Errol himself would still refuse to sit.

  “Gray,” he might say, and Errol imagined he would smoke a pipe by this time, “you remember the time I almost left? When I almost went to New Guinea? But you said stay, and by God that was enough for me. I always took your word on just about everything. Oh, I had my problems when you got involved with young Ralph. We came awfully close, you’ll remember, to snapping things off. But I guess that was just something you had to go through, to get out of your system. He was certainly a pretty boy. You know, I’ve still got those pictures you took of him early that morning? You never knew I saw you take them. I didn’t find them until after you died—” Errol would pause here and take a puff on his pipe and shoot the wildebeest a look; so she was dead, well past ninety you were so much closer to being a dead person than a live one that it was naturally easier to talk to the dead ones if you had a ch
oice. “I found them tucked away under some papers when I was going through your drawers. You hid them pretty well. I noticed they were soft, though, and wrinkled; you must have found them yourself often enough. Even in those crumpled photos, though, he looks pretty sweet. Asleep, of course. And you sure captured it—he looks real sad, absolutely. Tragic, I’d say. I’ve never seen so much despair in someone’s face while they were asleep. He had one beautiful body, though. You did have taste. And I’m old now, but I remember the guy pretty well. The tone of his voice, you know? It haunts me sometimes—sharp, slow, hollow. I don’t know if I ever told you of that conversation we had about blankness. Sent chills up my spine. He could be nasty sometimes, but tear your heart out others, I’m telling you. Well, I guess I don’t have to tell you, at that. You’re dead, and anyway, you probably knew that better than anybody.”

  Errol would pour himself a cognac, though the money would be getting tight and he’d buy the cheaper stuff now; Gray would be appalled—the bottle actually said Brandy. And that wasn’t the only thing that had changed around the house—thank God, he didn’t have to eat all those brownies and eclairs anymore. He had Gray to thank for one plate of false teeth, and he was going to hang on to the ones he had left.

  “One more thing before I turn in, Gray.” He’d take long drags and blow rings aimlessly into the air; the leopards on the wall would still be gnawing on the same meat, and he’d salute them with his pipe. “There was one incident a way long time ago we never talked about since. I swear that’s pretty incredible, since out of desperation you’d think we’d have covered everything, even if it embarrassed us a little. But we always managed to come up with something else to talk about, even if by the end there it actually was the weather and what birds came to the feeder and the fact that, though all that tennis and what have you had been good for your heart, it had wrecked your joints something awful. Well, you’re dead, so we’re safe—don’t worry, I won’t touch you now, and I never did again, did I? Oh, a comforting hug, a pat on the shoulder, a hand when you got too imbedded in that chair, but I never put my arms around you again and pressed you against my chest until I pushed all the breath out of your lungs. I only kissed you that one night. We’d drunk an awful lot, you were anxious to point that out the next morning. And I was only twenty-six, full of energy; we could pretend, you and I, the next day that I was like that with any woman after two bottles of wine—it’s natural, right? But I’ll never forget that morning, Gray, just as I’ll never forget the night before. I’ve never been so happy in my life. I didn’t tell you that, but you must have known, the way I bounced downstairs to breakfast so jauntily, really wanting to take you out to champagne and pastries, in spite of the hangover. You looked so severe, though, sitting at the table. You looked concerned. You said we had to talk and then we wouldn’t discuss it again. You made that awfully clear. You said it wasn’t ‘that way,’ that it couldn’t be. You said if I felt that way about you, then you’d have to find another assistant, since that situation was untenable. You actually used the word ‘untenable.’ So what was I supposed to do? This famous woman in my field wants to fire me because I’ve got a crush? I swallowed hard, and I lied so furiously I broke into a sweat, and then I said I had things to do. I skipped the champagne that morning, if I recall correctly.